An Insider’s Guide to the Body That Will Make You Healthier and Younger

by Mehmet C. Oz, M.D. and Michael F. Roizen

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This paperback edition of the #1 bestseller is enabled for use with the HarperCollins Unbound app on your mobile device. Scan specially marked pages to access additional content that offers even more insights for understanding your body and managing your health, including 20 videos with Dr. Mike Roizen sharing valuable tips to help you live longer—and younger—plus 11 interactive quizzes that test your knowledge and enhance your grasp of body systems, nutritional factors, and disease.

With new health studies and advice bombarding us every day, few people know much about what chugs, churns, and thumps throughout the miraculous system that is the human anatomy.

YOU: The Owner’s Manual challenges preconceived notions about how the human body works and ages, and takes you on a fascinating grand tour of all your blood-pumping, food-digesting, and numbers-remembering systems and organs—including the heart, brain, lungs, immune system, bones, and sensory organs.

In this now classic health manual, America’s favorite doctors, Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz, discuss how YOU actually have control over your genes. Discover how diseases start and how they affect your body—as well as advice on how to prevent and beat conditions that threaten your quality of life.

There are also 100 questions asked by you, and answered by the experts. For instance, do you know which of the following statements are true?

As you increase the amount you exercise, the rewards you gain from it increase as well. If you’re not a smoker, you have nothing to worry about when it comes to your lungs. Your immune system always knows the difference between your own cells and enemy invaders. The biggest threat to your arteries is cholesterol. Memory loss is a natural, inevitable part of aging. Stress is the greatest ager, and controlling it changes which of your genes is on.

Did you answer “true” for any of the above? Then take a look inside. Complete with exercise tips, nutritional guidelines, simple lifestyle changes, and alternative approaches, YOU: The Owner’s Manual debunks myths and gives you an easy, comprehensive, and life-changing How-To plan—as well as great-tasting and calorie-saving recipes—that can help you live a healthier, younger, and better life.

Authors

Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.

Mehmet C. Oz, M.D., is the multiple Emmy Award-winning host of The Dr. Oz Show. He is a professor and vice-chairman of surgery at Columbia University, the medical director of the Integrated Medicine Center, and director of the Heart Institute at New York Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center.

Michael F. Roizen

Photo by Bill Richert

Michael F. Roizen, M.D., is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be? He is the chief wellness officer of the Cleveland Clinic and chairman of the Wellness Institute.

Excerpt

Foreword to the Paperback Edition

When we wrote the first edition of You: The Owner’s Manual, few people expected that anyone could create a relatable, entertaining, and upbeat anatomy lesson of the human body for the general public. In that book, we aimed to teach folks about the heart and lungs, eyes and ears, bones and muscles, and even why it’s a good idea to think (just a little bit) about the final act of the digestive process. Our mission: Teach about the majesty of the body, as well as how you can best care for it.

Using everything from hard science to laugh-inducing illustrations, we tried to make it easy to understand complex biology—everything from how cholesterol is formed (and cleared) to how hormones can influence what you eat, how you feel, and why your moods can quickly swing from “get your smelly self away from me” to “come hither, darling.” The overwhelmingly positive response from you encouraged us to continue our mission to help people take control of their health.

Now, more than a decade later, we continue to expand our efforts to put the best health information in your hands, so you can make smart choices about how to live longer—and live better. Mike has built one of the most respected wellness centers in the world at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic. For the past five years I’ve hosted the nationally syndicated, Emmy Award–winning The Dr. Oz Show, which informs, entertains, and inspires a few million people daily. Together, we have collected insights and questions from our patients and viewers, and we have improved the original book with all of these experiences.

We both know that the advice we offer has to be 100 percent doable, easy to understand, and able to deliver great results. And it also has to be affordable, which is why we are proud to release the first paperback version of our book. Throughout the years, we have studied why so many of us fail in our quest for good health. Specifically, there may be lots of reasons why the modern world makes it hard to do the right thing—more screen and on-your-butt time, easier availability of junk food, and stress levels so high that it seeps up to and out of your eyeballs.

In this book, we give you the information you need to help you automate your life so that making the right choice is the choice that’s easy.

Perhaps most important to keep in mind is this: We now understand that people don’t change what they do based on what they know but rather on how they feel. So instead of trying to convince people to dutifully follow rules, we need to convince them that everyone has the right to feel delight in life, and that making healthy choices is part of feeling more sprightly than a twelve-week-old puppy with a peanut-butter-flavored chew toy. We never got this lesson in medical school (and not just because there were no such chew toys). But to that end, we have included soulful advice in the book to help nudge you to change.

Medicine has also advanced dramatically, so we have fully updated this newest edition of You: The Owner’s Manual. Doctors think very differently now about blood sugar, about when to treat cholesterol, and even about which weight-loss programs work best. We’ve also updated our information on recommended doses of vitamins, food allergies, the wisdom of longevity, and how to keep your brain sharp for your whole life.

The most important scientific advance of all? We should stop asking whether a problem is genetic or not. Science has learned that our behaviors can actually change our genes, so you should feel empowered with the knowledge that most ailments are reversible—and that what your wonderful and sacred body desires most is for you to show up in your own life. (We know. We asked.)

With these words of encouragement, we want to dedicate this first-ever paperback edition to all the people who understand that “everyone has the right to delight in life.”